Time Travel

One of the facts of my life is that a little over four years ago I lost one of the most important people in it, my husband. We met as graduate students at the University of Waterloo in the 70's, and from the moment that we decided to be together even for an afternoon we were together, even when we weren't in the same place. The work that he chose meant that he traveled a lot, and our agreement regarding how we wanted our children raised meant that I was a full-time mother and often on my own in the early years. In fact, this problem was what lead to our moving to Egypt in the first place. When someone asked our three year old daughter where she lived and she answered "I live in Canada and my daddy lives in Egypt", I knew it was time to move.

When he died, the job of settling the affairs of his rather extensive business network fell to my by default. I realised that none of his brothers really understood what he had done, and he had no partners other than me. For a mother/journalist, it was a pretty horrific experience. I'd been there as he built his companies but I'd never worked with any of them, and I didn't particularly like many of the people who were working for him. Just learning who to trust and who not to trust (which turned out to be almost everyone) took me months at a time when what I should have been doing was just sorting out my grief and my children's needs. But it had to be done and I did it.

Remember swimming classes when you were little? At some point the instructor would tell the students to swim to the other side of the pool underwater and you would hyperventilate a bit, take a deep breath and take off unsure whether you would reach the wall before your breath ran out. Just before touching the tiles your lungs would ache, your eyes would see the sunlight above the water, and you would want more than anything in the universe just to be up there breathing. That's been my life for the past four years. But it's over now. The settlements are done, the companies are on their respective paths, and I can see to my life again.

During this time, my son and then my daughter were students at Columbia University in New York, and I tried to make it there for a visit each year. We traveled to California to touch base with my family who had produced the first of the new generation in the person of my neice Naya. But I didn't go to Toronto, which was where our family home was rented out to a succession of tenants and where some of my dearest friends lived. My children each made the pilgrimage alone from New York to stay with Neil and Elaine and heal a bit so that Toronto could again be part of their lives, but I didn't until last night.

I flew in late last night, marveling at the changes in the pattern of lights that was Toronto from the air. It's a lot bigger now and I didn't feel that I was coming home in any way. I made my way to The Annex where Neil and Elaine live, arriving just after Neil had arrived from his hockey practice. Funny thing about Canadians.... they like hockey so much that they will go play at the oddest hours of the night if they can get the ice time. It was heavenly to be wrapped once more in the warmth, comfort and love of my friends' home. We sat on the front porch in the chill night sipping whiskey, watching marauding racoons (They are so much bolder and complacent than they were when we lived here!) and catching up on the past four years, albeit rather gingerly. Then I was tucked under a down comforter to drift off to the quiet neighbourhood noises of Toronto.

No matter what I do, tears are so close to the surface here. Our children were born here. This is where they went to nursery school, where they learned to swim, where they played in the leaves that I would rake in huge piles from our yard. I remember so many happy times. Working three teaching jobs to make ends meet while I was pregnant with our son and meeting friends in the evenings at a favourite restaurant for dinner. Walks in the lovely parks of the city before the children were born and after they changed our lives. Going out for Chinese food on Spadina with infants and later toddlers who learned to love dumplings in the cradle. The city has grown and changed and so have we. I sold our home here. It was old and needing renovations that would have been hell to do at a distance. The children agreed because they didn't feel that it was home anymore. I still have my haven here in The Annex where I can sit on Elaine's deck to drink my tea and watch squirrels as we did so many mornings when our children were young. One of her daughters is still, like mine, in university, while the elder has finished, like my son. I'm going to try to persuade her to come visit me in Egypt this fall since she was studying in Europe and might as well make the trip while it's shorter.

Tomorrow I have to go to a storage room to go through things that we left behind when we first moved to Egypt. I can't imagine how I'm going to handle that. But it's time to move on to the sunlight.

The Land of No Weather

I'm ready to go home now. I'm wet enough to last for another Egyptian year, I'm sure. The inhabitants of the eastern part of the US have had more than their share of rain this fall thanks to the efforts of hurricanes Frances, Ivan and now Jeanne. They have my sympathy and they can also have all that rain. I've had enough, thank you.

When I spoke to my daughter last week before flying out, she told me that they were "enjoying' cloudy skies, rain and chilly weather. Naturally, when I arrived it was sunny, bright and in the mid to high 20's, since I'd mostly packed sweaters. Oh well. I had some t-shirts along, so it all was manageable. That is until today. Today the tail end of Jeanne decided to visit the Big Apple and it began raining this morning. We had showers, drizzles and a bit of wind all day, but it wasn't so bad since after all, most of New York is indoors. But this evening we decided to venture into Chinatown for some Peking duck and when we emerged from our poultry orgy, we ran smack into a full gale. The winds were howling around corners, turning umbrellas inside out and driving the rain into parts of our bodies that we never expected to get wet. With the recent hikes in the prices of the Metro and the cabs in New York, we don't usually take a taxi here, but we made an exception tonight. I simply couldn't take getting any wetter.

We joke that Egypt appoints a weatherman about once every three hundred years or so. He accepts the job, walks outside to look around, and then announces that the weather will be sunny and the wind will come from the north for the most part. He then leaves since there will be no change in the weather for the next three hundred years. I can live with that sort of weather.

Big City Life

It's a grey cloudy Sunday in New York and the dorm that I'm staying in is utterly silent. Guess Sunday morning is sleep-in time around here. I arrived here on Friday afternoon and surrendered my brain to jet lag on arrival. Even though I'd stopped for a night's sleep in Vienna, my body had no idea at all of the time in New York. By 4 pm it was 11 pm in Cairo and my eyes were complaining but we kept them up for a few hours so that I could get into NYC time as quickly as possible. I hate waking up at 3 am with a body that says it's time to feed the birds even though the only birds around here are pigeons so fat and complacent that I almost stepped on the utterly flattened remains of one that had sat in the street long enough to get nailed by a truck. No sense of self preservation those birds! Not like our Egyptian pigeons who are their ancestors. Most of our pigeons belong to someone or are totally wild and act like it.

My body decided to play along and I slept until about 7 yesterday, when I got up and went for breakfast at my favourite breakfast place here, The Deluxe. It's just up the street from Tom's (famous from Seinfeld and Suzanne Vega and for its terrible service and worse food) which is for some people a favourite morning spot. The Deluxe has tables outside on the sidewalk for decent weather, which we had yesterday, and they make wonderful homefried potatoes to go with the omelets. I parked myself at one of the outside spots and watched the city wake up.

It was odd to sit and not see any donkey carts rattling up the streets but there haven't been any here for a while. As I sat sipping my coffee I noticed that Manhattan street theatre is about as good as Cairene. No wonder the kids loved it here for school. First note to myself was not to order tea in the US. I did at first and it was awful, having been made with water that wasn't hot enough. REAL tea drinking nations know that the temperature of the water is all important. I'd forgotten why it was that I learned to drink coffee here. At least the coffee was good.

At 8 am on a Saturday morning, they deliver beer here. More varieties of beer than we can remember in Egypt. Hmmm, another nice thing about New York. Most of them are rather hedonistic reasons. I watched two Spanish speaking young men wearing back braces flinging beer kegs out of a truck into the street, from which they were loaded onto hand trucks to move to the sidewalk. Good thing those kegs are strongly built because they really took a beating. Way back in the dark ages of my tenure in grad school I was a bar tender at the Grad Student Union at the University of Waterloo and I remember the amount of foam that kegs used to spew forth when they were first connected, and if the treatment of the kegs on Broadway were any example, now I know why.

Another interesting thought that came to me along with my raspberry jam and multigrain toast was just how heterogeneous the poplulation of Egypt is, even though locals assume that because they are "all Egyptians" it isn't heterogeneous. Manhattan is a wild mix, especially near Columbia University, but aside from the Asian population (which we also have, by the way) the people passing me on the street could have been the various flavours of Egyptian as well. The fact is that humans are simply becoming wonderfully mixed any more. After centuries of welcoming and absorbing travelers and invaders from various parts of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, Egyptians now appear in all sorts of colours, sizes, and shapes. People come and want to see "real Egyptians" and we always have to laugh. They are all "real Egyptians" but if they mean ancient Pharaonic type Egyptians, then maybe the citizens of Aswan or the now-displaced Nubians could qualify. Even so, the ancient Egyptians had Syrian, Phoenician, Cretan, Greek, Assyrian, Sudanese...you name it, whoever traveled in those days...blood mixed in due to war captives being brought home as slaves or victors who occupied cities in Egypt, so what a "real Egyptian" would have been is anybody's guess.

Well, time to snag a shower before all the kids get up.

From the Mango to the Apple

Tomorrow, if I can remember where my suitcase is, I will get on a flight to Vienna where I will get a much needed night's sleep in a hotel across from the airport. Then on Friday I will fly to JFK where some friends will collect me to deposit me on my daughter's doorstep for a couple of weeks in the Big Apple. I haven't been in the US for over a year so two weeks away from the Big Mango will be a change.

Not all of the trip will be vacation, however. I have a daughter at Columbia who wants some administrative help, bank account management and the like. I want to see some friends in Massachusetts if the transport can be arranged. And finally I have to travel to Toronto to go through some things that were put in storage in 1988 when we moved to Egypt "for two years". My husband was always saying that he'd ship the stuff over here, but somehow it never got done and now I doubt that I will bother to ship most of it. I mean, really, do I need 48 wine glasses, even if I do have 18 dogs? Or maybe it's especially since I have 18 dogs. And there is an entire box of decanters that were given to us as wedding presents and they have never had anything decanted into them. I guess this is where I find out about eBay or something like that.

There are things that I'm really looking forward to, like dinner at La Taqueria, a hole in the wall Mexican restaurant on Amsterdam Ave in the upper westside that serves brilliant Mexican food and Oso Negro beer. Bookstores are always lovely, and fresh bagels. But one of the things that my daughter wants help with is figuring out how to make plastic fruits and vegetables taste real. Don't know if I'll be much help there. Still, as my mom used to say, a change is as good as a rest.

Child Labour

I was the oldest of four children, and when people commented on how much work four children must be my mother used to say that she had four so that she would never have to do housework. She and my dad had us organised so that every morning before we went to school the house was vaccuumed, all the trash emptied, laundry collected and put in the washer so that it could be hung after school, breakfast was cooked, consumed, cleared and dishes washed, all the animals (and there were always lots) fed and cared for, and all the beds made and bedrooms tidied. I have two children who, bless their hearts, were raised with a housekeeper and a gardener and a driver, all of which made my life easier but left them rather ill-prepared for fending for themselves in university. To their credit, they have learned despite the disability.

In Egypt, among the lower middle class and on down, the children work. Education in Egypt is supposed to be compulsory and most of the children go to some sort of school, whether a government school or a mosque school. In the countryside children work quite a lot, as they have for centuries in most rural areas. I have a roll of snapshots in my head: a girl about 5 with her galabeya hiked up around her hips squatting by a tub of soapy water scrubbing dishes while her younger brother helps to carry a bucket of water from the pump; a boy not more than four years old solemnly, and rather inaccurately, sweeping the sidewalk in front of his mother's shop next to where I'm sitting with two friends drinking coffee; a pair of sisters who guide their slowly increasing flock of sheep and goats down the road to the shelter by their father's field and back home each morning and evening before and after school.

I'm very much in favour of education, no question about it. As well, I think that a bit of work done to help in the family is a good thing. There is very much an attitude in more "developed" countries that children are too young to do any work and that somehow childhood should be dedicated to school and play. While I'd like to boost the quality of schooling for the kids around here, I have to admit that they are learning a lot from helping out around the house and fields and that they seem to have plenty of time to play as well. They don't have much time for television, their football games are likely to be in the desert or a fallow field or even the street rather than a mowed field. But it's common to see a group of children sitting in the shade of a mulberry tree working on their homework together.

I'm not sure that this is such a bad childhood.

The Neverending Story

Living in Egypt: Stranger in a Strange Land

The longer I blog, the more interesting twists to the practice I find. One twist that I'm sure more experienced bloggers than I have worked out is how to tell where a message has been posted when you get an email to notify you that one has been posted. I've used Haloscan but as yet haven't figured out how to use it for the information that I want, and it may, in fact, be one of those "You can't get there from here" situations. So, when I got a post from the ubiquitous Anonymous discussing the interesting Muslim attitude to religion change, I actually went schlepping through my archives to find where the post was made.

I found the post back on July 17 with a discussion of marriage. It's obvious to me from the number of comments that come to these posts that Islam in general is intriguing a lot of my readers and that the social/family aspects of it are especially interesting. I suppose that I could just post a comment there but that's kind of unsatisfying. So instead I decided to post something referring to a previous post, which adds a bit of weaving to the tapestry.

When I was getting to know my husband, I was not technically a Muslim. To technically be a Muslim there are steps to be taken that vary from source to source. My husband, not being very bound by the more complicated traditions, said that basically I had to repeat the Fattah, the opening lines of the Quran, with belief and conviction. When we moved to Egypt and were faced with the legal system, we discovered that I had to go to Al Azhar, be interviewed by a sheikh to satisfy him that my adoption was not frivolous, and then I would be registered as an "official" Muslim. As Mr/Ms Anonymous noted, Islam does not demand that a non-Muslim wife become Muslim, but being a non-Muslim married to a Muslim is an act of recklessness under Egyptian law if there are children involved.

As well, also as noted by Mr/Ms A., Muslims are discouraged from trying to convert others to Islam. At the very least, this is extremely bad manners on the part of the converter, and in the eyes of the law, it is illegal. Since it is assumed that Muslims will not go around trying to bring the world into the fold of Islam, so the law was probably created to prevent others from converting Muslims to other religions. My husband was very specific in our discussions of Islam that he would never ask me to become a Muslim, and his mother on hearing that I was Muslim immediately demanded of him whether he had applied any duress to me or tried to persuade me. Either would have been unforgivable in her eyes.

Unfortunately, for someone to give up Islam for another religion is both unthinkable and unforgivable. The general rule of thumb is that an apostate is destined for a nasty end. This rather inflexible attitude is not one of the more endearing aspects of Islam, although historically it is somewhat understandable in its logic. Islam places itself firmly in the same lineage as the Judeo-Christian tradition. Readers of the Quran will find familiar Old Testament stories such as Noah and his ark and many New Testament stories of Jesus. As (in Muslim eyes) the natural successor and the ultimate refinement in the development initiated by the Jews and tuned more by Jesus, Islam is the final step in development and to what would a Muslim turn after all? The logic makes sense, really, even if the conclusion is a bit abrupt.

All that lives changes, however, even religions. There have been changes in Judaism, Christianity, and in Islam even, and there are likely to be more as long as they are living religions. Right now there are more mixed Muslim/non-Muslim marriages in which the woman is Muslim than there ever have been. My inlaws would be very upset if my daughter were to marry a technical non-Muslim, but I believe that there is more to Islam than technicalities. One's relationship to God is the most personal thing that exists, and (as always being a bit of a square peg in a round hole) it really isn't ANYONE else's business at all.

Messing About In Boats

After a long day of dashing about Cairo, sitting in meetings, and having to make it back to Abu Sir in time to feed the menagerie, the last thing that I wanted to do was go for a felucca ride tonight. But my friends from Alexandria, Francoise and Catherine, were in town to commune with the Cultural Attache of the French embassy for a few days and after their day of meetings, a felucca ride was felt to be the best thing. I was the transport, so I met them at a sidewalk coffeeshop in Maadi where we commiserated over latte's and capuccino's and then went off to rent a boat for an hour.

Francoise and Catherine are both French, teachers of French in Egyptian schools, and employees of the embassy who train teachers and try to introduce innovative teaching techniques to teachers of the Egyptian French schools. It may seem odd, but children in Egypt can attend school in almost any language and culture in Cairo. There are French, American, Japanese, Pakistani, Canadian, British, German, and Irish schools here, to name a few. French schools are often receiving technical support from the French government, and Francoise is the chief instrument of this support. Her daughters went to primary school with my children, as did Catherine's son, and we've been friends since I first moved to Egypt.

By the time we were tired of caffeine, it was dark but that is no deterrent to felucca sailors. In fact, night time is one of the best times to enjoy the Nile. The feluccas are wooden lateen-rigged sailboats that can carry as many as 20 or so people around a central table that is perfect for picnics. Since it costs about 35 LE (divide by 6 roughly to get a USD rate) for an hour on the river, this comes down to peanuts for a large group. The rate is per boat per hour, not per person. We climbed down the stone steps to the Nile from the busy Corniche and walked onto a boat.

Our captain poled us away from the dock and raised the sail as we headed into the current. As you may have learned in a geography class, the Nile flows north, one of the few rivers not on the Arctic circle to do so. On the other hand, our prevailing winds are from the north to the south, which means that for eons people have used sails to travel south against the current while being able to just drift back downstream to the north. Tonight the river was filled with boats as students returning to school were gathering to catch up with each other's summer and enjoy an evening without homework before school starts. There were some out there filled with ex-pats from Maadi as well, as we could tell from the American accents floating across the water out of the dark.

If you are into complete compliance with all safety regulations, feluccas are not for you. They have no running lights, and if you choose not to use the light over the table, no lights at all. Life jackets?: What are they? But there aren't very many accidents involving feluccas. Power boats don't like to hit them because the heavy wood construction does horrible things to fibreglass. The captains are extremely skilled sailors who generally have grown up on the water and they handle the boats beautifully. I've helped to dock sailboats but doing it with no motor and just using the drift of the river and the wind is quite a trick. So what's the attraction?

There we were, three rather stressed middle aged women sailing with the wind upstream on the Nile and experiencing the sensation of the stress sliding downstream away from us. The breeze, fresh and strong on shore, seemed to envelope us, coming from all directions and cooling us gently. As we moved away from the shore the roar of the heavy traffic on the Corniche was absorbed by the water, fading to a gentle rumble. We could hear laughter and chat from other feluccas near us on the river and at one point we passed a motor launch usually used as a water taxi but now filled with teenagers singing and clapping their hands in unison. It was too far away to make out the words, but the craft glowed with youthful happiness. Another felucca came by and some of the college age passengers were dancing baladi style in the light of a bare bulb to the music played on a portable stereo. What foreigners call belly dancing is called baladi dancing here and it isn't only the province only of scantily clad women in fancy trousers. Everyone learns that style of dancing, hence the term baladi or country-style, and these kids were good.

We were far enough out on the river that we could just make out the lights of the restaurants, clubs and parks along the shore, still filled with families who would soon be spending their evenings with lessons and homework inside. The skyline of riverside apartments on the Maadi side of the river contrasted with the high reeds and palms of the Giza shore where it was still farmland with the occasional outrageously ridiculously large villa. It's hard to convey the magic of the Nile at night, but the peace that our hour imparted was miraculous.

When we had finished the ride and climbed the stairs back into the noise and pollution of the city, the traffic on the Corniche had somehow increased dramatically. Cars were passing at high speed and pretty much bumper to bumper. We knew that sooner or later there would be a break and we grabbed the first one to make it to the median. As we waited there for the next one, a young man came up to us, gestured for us to follow him and stepped off the strip into the traffic. We just looked at each other, trying to decide if he was a total nutcase or he knew something that we didn't. We opted for the nutcase at first, but then he held up his hand commanding the traffic to stop and it did! We scrambled across the road before the drivers could change their minds, and we got into the car. The young man opened the car door for me, as they often do when they are hoping for a tip for "helping" you park your car (when in fact they've mostly just gotten in your way). But in this case, we figured that our traffic stopper really deserved a tip, so we gave one. At that point, we realised that he was deaf and dumb. Maybe not hearing the traffic makes it easier to risk your life in the streets. I wouldn't know. But we all decided that after a grim day, someone like that made it all worthwhile.